In certain fields such as roadway maintenance, farming, and ranching, it is often desirable to spread various spreadable materials, such as salt, sand, gravel, dirt, grain, seed, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, and other granular or particulate matter, for example, onto a target surface such as a roadway or piece of land. Equipment used for such spreading typically includes a hopper and a material transportation mechanism configured for feeding the spreadable material from the hopper to a spreader. One challenge for such equipment is that some spreadable materials may be quite corrosive to the equipment, thus necessitating frequent downtime for maintenance and repair. Another challenge for such equipment is that the preferred material transportation mechanism may vary from one spreadable material to another and one application to another, which again may cause undesired downtime between jobs in order to switch from one material transportation mechanism to another, or it may require the acquisition of completely different spreader assemblies. It would be a significant advancement in the art to provide a spreader assembly for which the material transportation mechanism is easily changed and which is less susceptible to damage from corrosion.